AMD has announced the first Ryzen 9000 Series CPU rocking 3D V-Cache, and it’s not pulling any punches. While we’ll need to test it for ourselves, internal numbers point towards Ryzen 7 9800X3D being the new king of gaming, at least when considering the price.
According to AMD’s testing, Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivers on average 8% performance uplift in games compared to the 7800X3D. The figure jumps up to 26% on titles that greatly benefit from the additional cache – like Hogwarts Legacy. Against the latest Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, AMD claims up to a whopping 59% boost in performance, with an average increase of 20% using a pool of 40 titles. Impressive results, for sure.
As expected, Ryzen 7 9800X3D will be an eight-core Zen 5 chip featuring 104MB of total cache and a 5.2GHz max boost frequency. 64MB of this cache is courtesy of the additional 3D V-Cache layer, which now sits below the compute die instead of up top, as seen in previous X3D processors. It also boasts a 500MHz higher base frequency than its predecessor, ensuring higher performance at all times.
Better yet, for the first time, Ryzen 7 9800X3D officially allows overclocking, potentially pushing performance even higher given proper cooling. It seems that flipping the cache layer below the cores plays a role in this.
Alongside CPU bobbins, AMD has also indicated that it is working with Activision to integrate its upcoming machine learning-based upscaler into Call of Duty Black Ops 6. Whether it will be called FSR 4 or something else is unknown, but if we believe the recent paper on GPUOpen, AMD may also be working on neural ray tracing and path tracing denoisers to improve performance and quality.
Ryzen 7 9800X3D will be available on November 7 at an undisclosed price. That said, according to the latest rumours and leaks, this CPU is expected to retail for €463.56 or $479, i.e. $30 higher than its predecessor. Rendezvous in a week to find out the true performance of the new gaming king.
